Friday, September 18, 2015

1. I sometimes write parts of future blog
posts while holding my son, 2, just after he wakes, but before I put
my computer away for the day. I am doing this now (yesterday, at time
of publication). Little Man, who loves puppets and discovered
high-fiving last week, just held up the hand of the Mickey Mouse he
takes to bed and said, "High five!" making me smile and writing
a quarter of this post in the process.

Or was that an
eighth?

On an amusing/frustrating note, he has been a "slow
adopter" of solid food or, in the words of his pediatrician, a "picky
eater". My mother-in-law, here to help while my wife is away for her
boards, called him "persnickety," a description he immediately lived
up to by picking the pimientos out of some olives I had given him as a
snack. On the bright side, he ate the olives themselves and said,
"More olives." He ate those, too, which is not something I have necessarily
come to expect after such requests.

2. How much of your email does Google have
copies of? Quite possibly, most
of it, even if you try to hide on your own email server, if lots
of your friends and associates use GMail:

Despite the fact
that I spend hundreds of dollars a year and hours of work to host my
own email server, Google has about half of my personal email! Last
year, Google delivered 57% of the emails in my inbox that I replied
to. They have delivered more than a third of all the email I've
replied to every year since 2006 and more than half since 2010. On the
upside, there is some indication that the proportion is going down. So
far this year, only 51% of the emails I've replied to arrived from
Google.

In the past, I have sometimes half-considered
moving off of GMail for other reasons. I now see that I can pretty
much discount improved privacy as a benefit from making that move, at
least without also taking other measures.

3. Via
HBL comes a
bit of good news for student activists at government
schools:

Several months after the Foundation for
Individual Rights in Education wrote to the University of
California-Davis to protest its punishment of a student club on
trademark grounds, the school has backed
down, FIRE said today.

What was the
cardinal sin of the Ayn Rand Society at UC Davis? Identifying
where it was based...

As The College Fix
notes, this cute way of threatening faculty and students with
unconventional views has been seen before.

4. Were there not a serious chance of her
being elected President, I'd find thisdescription
of Hillary Clinton more amusing:

... It's tempting to
take pity on the former First Lady. She so nakedly lusts for power and
is so ill-equipped to compete in terms of personality that it's
obvious she expected a coronation. She lost in 2008 to Obama for the
same reason. Her tacit entitlement mentality premise that she paid her
dues and it's her rightful place to become the first woman president
may again make way for an upstart from the left. This woman's whole
undistinguished career is based on grafting herself onto the names,
works and lives of others, like a parasite, and all it adds up to is a
brittle legacy of one who blindly stood by her man, whether it was
Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, making her 1992 assertion ("I'm not
Tammy Wynette ... ") to the contrary a projection of the blank woman
she really is.

On a more serious note, I found this post,
with its descriptions of all the major presidential candidates, edifying.